© photo by Jeff Day

Christina Chalmers

Woman with pale skin and blonde hair wearing lavender crew neck; she is smiling

Doctoral Student Fellow

Crises of Transmission: the Concept of Inheritance, the Critique of the Family, and the Philosophy of History in 1970s Italy

Christina Chalmers is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature, who researches the relationship between the philosophy of history and the critique of the family in post-war Italy, focusing on concepts of inheritance, generation, reproduction and transmission. Her dissertation makes inroads into a far-reaching critique of the structural embeddedness of “family values” in social and political life, by excavating an underlooked intellectual and conceptual history of the valences of inheritance and kinship in 1970s Italy. Alongside support from the Center for the Humanities and NYU’s Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship, she is an American Association of University Women International Fellow and a Remarque Institute Doctoral Fellow in 2022-23. Her articles on Marx and double freedom, and inheritance and abolition in psychoanalysis are forthcoming from Diacritics and Parapraxis. Recent translations include Elvio Fachinelli’s On Freud (MIT Press, 2022), Franco Farinelli’s Blinding Polyphemus (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and articles by Yoshihiko Ichida (‘Foucault’s Anti-Oedipus’) and Judith Revel (‘The Late Foucault’) which are forthcoming in a volume on Foucault’s late writings (Duke University Press). Her full-length collection of poetry, Subterflect, will be released in September 2022 from Distance No Object Press in London.